00:00This month, Chinese scientists claimed that their gigantic sky-eye telescope could have
00:05picked up trace radio communications from intelligent aliens, but it turns out it may
00:11have just been a case of mixed signals.
00:17So on June the 14th, Chinese astronomers came out with claims that while they were using
00:22China's gigantic 500-meter aperture FAST or sky-eye telescope, they picked up three signals
00:31which they think could have come from intelligent aliens, one in 2019 and two in 2022.
00:37Now, narrowband radio signals aren't usually produced by nature, but humans use them a lot
00:43in satellites, TVs, cell phones, radar, so when scientists see them coming from space,
00:51they think there's a possibility that there could be some form of intelligent life form
00:56that may have been sending them. Maybe we were just sent an intergalactic what you up to,
01:01or we intercepted some alien daytime TV. Either way, there's a possibility when we see
01:08narrowband signals that it comes from intelligent life. The story quickly started making headlines
01:13around the world and appearing all over social media before Dan Wertheimer, an American SETI
01:19or search for extraterrestrial intelligence scientist who worked closely with the Chinese
01:24scientists in finding the signals, came out to say that they were almost certainly not from aliens,
01:30but from human technology instead.
01:32But how can Wertheimer know for sure? Well, Wertheimer said to us that the big problem with the gigantic
01:40radio telescopes that scientists use to intercept all of these radio signals is that they're so
01:46sensitive, they can measure radio signals that are beamed from Earth from light years away.
01:53Now, that may be amazing for finding things from distance, but it means that they're also incredibly
01:58susceptible to the zillions of homegrown signals that we produce every second. Now, some of these
02:04signals, even to a trained scientist, could fool them and appear like they genuinely came from deep
02:12space. We call these errant signals RFIs, or radio frequency interference, and Wertheimer says that if you
02:20haven't been studying them for that long, then it means that you're much more likely to get hoodwinked
02:27by a subtle interference effect. Despite the error having spread around the world, the scientists need
02:33not feel too embarrassed. This recent false alarm is far from the first time that alien hunting scientists
02:41have been led astray by noise from chattering humans. In 2019, for instance, astronomers thought they spotted a
02:48narrowband radio signal beamed to Earth from Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star to our sun,
02:55but further studies, made two years later, revealed that it was most likely
03:00from malfunctioning human equipment. Another famous set of signals, which bewitched
03:06scientists between 2011 and 2014, was also supposed to have come from aliens,
03:13until scientists realized that it was actually made by their fellow researchers microwaving their lunches.
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